As the use of networks increases, especially in telecommunications, network system providers face conflicting demands from the customer, who demands increase network reliability and performance, and from the business environment, which is sensitive to the cost of operating and maintaining the higher level of service.
Telecommunications networks provide one illustrative example. In telecommunications networks today two basic paradigms are present, either capacity is over provisioned to ensure quality or quality is guaranteed by means of traffic contracts. Traffic Contracts are the traditional mean of a telecom operator and telecom network equipment manufacturer (NEM). The over provisioning is the approach that IP-carriers in many cases have chosen to adopt.
In Wired networks the amount of capacity is simply the quantity of the optical cables and the capacity of each of them. With the possibility to, today, transmit 40 Gbps in a single fiber, sufficient capacity, in the network core, can be, today, obtained given a proper design. In Wireless networks, capacity is determined by how a finite amount of spectrum is modulated to achieve a high throughput. The capacity and the performance can in many cases be measured in Mbps/km2.
In wireless networks, the reduction of user turnover (also referred to as churn) is a key business driver. In a competitive marketplace, network operators strive to improve network coverage and hand off performance in order to reduce dropped call rates, an inverse measure of quality of service which is a key contributor to churn. The network operators face trade-offs between investment, churn and quality of service.
Since capacity in wireless networks is dependent on both the amount of network equipment, i.e. Base Stations, and the optimization of the radio coverage (antenna tuning, frequency planning, power tuning etc.), quality and performance become a factor of investment with a much higher level of investment needed for a certain end user capacity than a Wired core network would have.
A problem arises in balancing a good enough quality against an investment level that the business can support. The concept can be deduced down to two simple parameters: Quality of the connection for the end user and the level of Optimization of the connection for the end user.
Traditionally Quality has been possible to be measured in Voice connections using standardized formulas, PSQM, PESQ, PAMS etc. These are all relevant to Voice calls and voice connections. They are as well based on active traffic generation.
For quality analysis of IP transactions, IETF and ETSI have developed a certain amount of test cases. These are based on active testing but can in most cases easily be adopted into a framework of passive testing. Neither IETF nor ETSI have developed any normalization scheme for the test cases, i.e. it is not understood if a certain measurement result is good or bad.
Therefore, there is a need to provide methods and systems that enable network operators and network equipment manufacturers (NEMS) to understand the level of optimization in both current networks and networks under deployment.
In order to satisfy or balance those demand on network operators and NEMs, network analysis systems have been developed to facilitate the planning, troubleshooting, installing, and maintaining present-day networks.
Many network analysis systems have a graphical user interface that displays data in the network grouped by data session or by independent network events. A number of these groups can be displayed along with characteristics of the data. The display enables the identification of errors. However, present network analysis systems do not display data that enables network operators and NEMs to understand the level of optimization in both current networks and networks under deployment.
Therefore, there is a need for improved graphical user interfaces that display data that enables network operators and NEMs to understand the level of optimization in both current networks and networks under deployment.